Hazel Wilmot calls Amanda Vickers, her former student and editor of Roaming New England Magazine, with a story idea about a haunted New Hampshire inn. Amanda is intrigued, but before she can get there Hazel dies in a fall while exploring the abandoned inn. Accompanied by her young associate editor, Amanda travels to Shadsborough, a small town gripped by fear. And the fear seems to be catching—was Hazel's death accidental?

Amanda Vickers and Marcie Ducasse, editors at Roaming New England Magazine, return in this story to once again investigate the mysteries surrounding supernatural events in New England. Marcie pays a visit to the town of West Windham, Maine, to check out a report about the so-called Monster of Lake Opal, a Loch Ness-type creature that is said to inhabit the dark depths of the lake. Amanda joins Marcie to attend a seance at the home of a man trying to contact his late wife's spirit, in hopes of discovering the identity of her killer. The spirit channeled by the medium tells them to look in her coffin to find a clue to the murderer's identity. Shortly after the seance, the mausoleum containing the coffin is broken into and a local boy is attacked and seriously injured in the process. Marcie and Amanda quickly find themselves drawn into the hunt for both a strange sea creature and a murderer who appears willing to kill again in order to prevent this grave justice.

When Marcie Ducasse, assistant editor of Roaming New England Magazine, makes her first solo trip through northern New England checking into stories of supernatural happenings, she expects to hear some strange tales, not become part of one. But when a farmer tells Marcie about the ghosts of three men hanged in his barn back in the 1940s and then turns up a few hours later hanging up in that same barn, Marcie finds herself up to her neck in a murder investigation. With the help of Kevin Murray, a local newspaper reporter, Marcie begins digging into the case, and she quickly discovers that even murders committed over sixty years ago are not dead and buried—especially when they take the form of ghosts from the past.

When Marcie Ducasse, newly promoted associate editor of Roaming New England magazine, gets a call from Steve Rostow, an old college friend, telling her that the ghost of a girl killed twenty years ago on the night of her senior prom has returned seeking vengeance, she knows this is the right material for her “Weird Happenings” column. As Marcie and Steve investigate further they find that one of the richest men in the town of Arbella, Connecticut, who was a suspect in the girl’s murder, is trying to hush up the ghost s attacks. He would also like to keep Marcie and Steve from writing their story in order to protect his own political ambitions. As the attacks reach a murderous crescendo, it becomes clear that they can no longer be concealed, and Marcie and Steve are forced to unearth events that happened twenty years before, in order to understand who killed the girl on the night of her prom and who—or what—has returned to avenge her.

When Jerome Kronberg, who is facing prosecution for investment fraud, dies in a fall from a mountain in Connecticut, there are some people who believe it was no accident. Some think it was suicide; some suspect he was killed by an irate client. Others suspect a more supernatural cause. According to the legend of The Black Dog, if you see the dog three times on the mountain, you die, and Kronberg had seen the dog twice when he took his last hike. It is The Black Dog that motivates Marcie Ducasse to investigate the death for her Weird Happenings Column in Roaming New England Magazine. While Marcie is dealing with a deadly dog, Amanda Vickers, her editor, is trying to decide whether to accept a proposal of marriage from her persistent boyfriend. Both women are forced by the events confronting them to dig down and find new sources of strength.